Live Life Well Info

Chapter 1: Why pH is so Important

What if you could, without a doctor and for no more than the cost of a few pennies, learn the state of your health? You can: easily and in less than a minute’s time. If the result is not a healthy one but you’re not suffering from malfunction (yet), knowing your pH now affords you time to make changes before your body breaks down. If you do already have symptoms you can use the information in this book to assist you in trying to undo the damage. If your result is healthy, then you can enjoy the peace of mind of knowing your body has adequate reserves.

We’re all walking chemical equations living in the equivalent of an aquarium (with skin on instead of glass). Just as fish in a tank will die if the pH of the water isn’t appropriate, we will experience disease if our fluids (and eventually tissues) are not at a life-supporting pH level. A low pH is the first sign that something is amiss, prior to an organ malfunctioning, prior to cancer, or just about any other disease being diagnosed. Think of your salivary pH as nature’s way of giving you a non-painful warning so that you can do something about it while you still have time.

All of our bodily metabolic processes depend upon having a proper pH. While each disease may have its own name, most diseases have the same underlying conditions— acidity of the fluids and tissues. The good news is that acidity is preventable and may often be reversible. I’ll show you how this is possible with a combination of diet and lifestyle and you’ll be able to gauge (by both how you feel and by your pH reading) your progress and what works best for you.

Do you ever wonder why it is that when groups of people are exposed to the same germ, virus, or other pathogen, some of them get sick and others don’t? The difference is due to the state of their immune systems at the time of exposure, and this depends upon their pH level. Pathogens simply can’t survive in a pH balanced body. Inversely, pathogens not only thrive in an acidic environment but they create and cast off wastes which are acidic. This process adds to the acidity of the cells they reside in and ensures their ongoing presence.

Often, the first sign of a pH imbalance is feeling tired. The lower your salivary pH is the greater your exhaustion and fatigue. If our extra cellular fluids become acidic (this is the first place in the body that acids get stored), we’ll be more tired, prone to catching colds, and more likely to develop allergies/sensitivities. If these extra-cellular fluids continue in their acidic trend, our bodies develop aches, pains, weight gain or loss, headaches, chest pains, stomach aches, premature aging, and fungal infections. If the presence of acids continues in an elevated ratio to bases (alkaline nutrients), then cancer and other serious conditions take hold.

Degenerative diseases and most maladies, including cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, kidney and gall stones, excess weight, insufficient immunity, and atherosclerosis, correlate with excess acidity in the body. Below are some common diseases and explanations of how pH created the condition for these diseases. In the chapters that follow you’ll learn what you can do to prevent or reverse them.

Fatigue

When your cells don’t have enough oxygen, you feel tired. As you’ll learn in the chapter on minerals, some minerals carry oxygen with them into your body and across your cell membranes. When your cells don’t have enough energy-providing nutrients, and they are polluted with substances that require energy to be dealt with, your body has to work harder just to get through each day. It’s a double hindrance: you don’t have what you need to go full gusto and what you do have is being used up by energy-robbing acids. The average chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia sufferer has anywhere from 1 to 7 pathogens that need to be eradicated before they can return to their previous energy level.

These pathogens produce toxins that are acidic and reduce the absorption of the vitamins, minerals, and protein you ingest. Pathogens also inhibit the carrying of oxygen into the cells. It gets worse from there: your enzymes become disabled so they can’t do what they’re there to do (assist every metabolic process in the body) and your cells can’t produce the A.T.P. (energy packets) that they need to function (so you can feel vibrant), therefore your cells erode and die. The outcome (unless you turn it around with the information we’ll cover in this book) is that you become even more acidic.

Heart Attack and Stroke from “Thick Blood”

When there is hyper-coagulation (red blood cells clumped together), the blood doesn’t flow well and tends to form clots which can flow to the heart (resulting in a heart attack) or the brain (resulting in a stroke). The cause of thickened blood is often fibrin deposited in blood vessels and capillaries. When our bodies detect pathogens in the blood they lay down fibrin, which acts like a mesh to prevent these detrimental organisms from circulating. Viruses, harmful bacteria, and parasites are pathogens which activate the production of thrombin (a coagulation protein). Thrombin produces fibrin and the resulting hyper-coagulation of the blood makes it nearly impossible to get enough oxygen and nutrients into the bodily tissues. The presence of this fibrin manifests as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, in addition to putting one at risk for a stroke or a heart attack. To compound the condition, thicker blood is more difficult to pump causing the body to work harder (expending energy). Fibrin reduces oxygen presence. This reduction in oxygen is self-serving for the pathogens because oxygen is a threat to their existence and, hidden in the fibrin, they can often go undetected by the immune system. Pathogens often lead to secondary infections, triggering even more hyper-coagulation of the blood.

Often heavy metal toxicity, which we’ll cover in the Causes of Imbalance section, is an underlying cause. The presence of these metals damages the immune system and allows infections to get a foothold. The infections induce hyper-coagulability of the blood, and this causes a lack of oxygenation. The result is that you have less energy and are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.

Arthritis

Although there are over 100 forms of arthritis, they all share the common symptom of joint pain. Lower (more acidic) pH promotes the formation of crystals within joints. A by-product of normal bodily processes is uric acid. When the body is not able to effectively eliminate this uric acid, or is taking in more acids than it can eliminate, the body will solidify the uric acid into a salt that builds up in the joints, resulting in gout and other forms of arthritis.

Weight Gain

One way that the body attempts to protect its vital organs is to keep toxins from floating freely and it does this by “walling them off” with fat cells. When our bodies are too acidic they will hold on to fat. To compound matters, acidity slows metabolism because your cells can’t make enough A.T.P. from the food eaten to burn off the intake. As the body becomes pH neutral, it gradually releases these acids and toxins from storage. The toxins are released at a pace that the body can handle and your weight loss efforts become more successful.

Cancer

Cancer is not able to proliferate in a pH neutral body. Otto Warburg, a German M.D., was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1931 for his hypothesis that cancer cells generate their own energy (A.T.P.) through a non-oxidative breakdown of glucose, which is in contrast to how healthy cells generate their A.T.P. “If our internal environment was changed from an acidic oxygen-deprived environment to an alkaline environment full of oxygen, viruses, bacteria and fungus cannot live” (excerpt from his 1931 study).

In his speech at the Meeting of Nobel Laureates, June 30, 1966, Warburg said, “cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.” He espoused that cancer could be caused or cured by changing the oxygen carrying ability of the fluid. Oxford University awarded Warburg an honorary doctorate in 1952 for his research into the relationship between cancer cells, malignant tumors, oxygen, and the correlations with one’s internal pH. His research posited that the pH of one’s internal environment directly correlates to the formation and multiplication of or eradication of cancer cells. He insisted that a lack of internal oxygen is what allows cancer to flourish. He found that the presence of increased amounts of oxygen inhibits the spread of cancer cells and will eventually cause them to die off. Inversely, each time he lowered the oxygen content of a cell by 35% the cell became cancerous. This explains why the salivary pH of cancer patients usually measures 4.5 when the cancer is terminal and the patient is in the end stages.

The aforementioned conditions are just a sampling of health conditions provided here as examples of the importance of your internal pH. Since the majority of all diseases correlate to a lowered pH, reduced oxygen, and a shortage of minerals (these 3 are tightly intertwined), it’s important to know how your body becomes acidic and what you can do about it.

Your pH level is an indication of your general health, not a diagnostic tool for a specific ailment. Whatever health concern you are faced with, you can monitor your progress toward a proper acid/alkaline balance by testing your salivary pH in addition to working with talented practitioners and undergoing diagnostic testing for further insight.

Chapter 2: What pH is

The term pH is an acronym for “potential for hydrogen”. pH measures the relationship between oxygen and hydrogen in a substance.

In general, water is considered neutral at a pH of 7.0. Any substance below 7.0 is an acid, and anything over 7.0 is a base (alkaline).

The higher the pH the more oxygen a substance can carry within it. As you learned in your high school chemistry class, alkaline solutions tend to absorb oxygen, while acids tend to expel oxygen. A mild alkali can absorb over 100 times as much oxygen as a mild acid. Why this matters is you’ll feel a lot better and be disease resistant in an oxygenated body.

The more acid there is in the body the less ability bodily fluids have to absorb oxygen. As the body becomes acidic oxygen is driven out leaving it vulnerable to disease formation. The more negatively charged hydroxyl ions (OH-), which contain oxygen, there are in the body, the more ability its fluids have to absorb additional oxygen and thereby maintain or regain health.

The measurement of pH is logarithmic, such that each step is ten times the previous. In other words, a pH of 4.5 is 10 times more acidic than 5.5, 100 times more acid than 6.5 and 1,000 times more acid than 7.5. Inversely, a pH of 7.0 means there is 10 times more oxygen available to your cells than at a pH of 6.0. Hence, what may be a slight shift on the litmus paper is actually a significant step for your body.

In a healthy person the blood is 7.4, the spinal fluid is 7.4, the lymph is 7.4, and the pH of the saliva upon rising is 6.8 – 7.5. Stomach fluids must remain acidic to digest food and urine is acidic because it contains wastes being removed from the body.

The most critical liquid of the body is the blood which must have a pH of 7.4 so that it can retain its oxygen. The body will do whatever it takes to keep the blood at a constant pH of 7.4 (even a slight variation can result in instant death). The body will take acid-buffering minerals from other areas within it and pull these bases into the bloodstream. The areas where minerals were removed from will eventually experience disease, unless enough minerals are brought in to offset the borrowing. Parallel to this the body will shunt acids out of the blood in order to keep the blood’s pH from being lowered. The location it shunts the acids to will be affected in that these cells will become more acidic and lower in oxygen. This process is to the detriment of the receiving cells, but is not as immediately life-threatening as would be the case if these acids remained in the blood. As this continues, these receiving areas increase in acidity and some cells die. These dead cells turn into acids.

Some cells, however, may adapt by becoming malignant. These malignant cells can grow indefinitely and without order, possibly resulting in cancer. The acids stored in our body can become solid wastes such as fat, cholesterol, kidney stones, and gallstones. Solid wastes build up within our bodies unless we take in the nutrients needed to process these acids out. When tissues containing these stored acid wastes become weak from them, they are less able to fight viral and microbial infections, and a downward spiral can ensue. This is why it’s so crucial to monitor your pH.

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About us

“I have more than 20 years of experience studying and teaching wellness principles. Each physical recommendation in “Your Health = Your pH” is based upon a minimum of 3 clinical studies. I am an ongoing contributor to Well Being Journal and Career Woman Inc. I hope I can be assistive to you in your journey.”